A wide range of software tools that enable users to create different kinds of electronic documents are known in the prior art. These software tools vary greatly in terms of complexity as well as skill sets required for their use. Word processors such as Microsoft® Word™ allow users to create documents that combine text with images and allow for numerous fonts and layout options without requiring that the user be skilled with a programming language.
There are other tools that allow programmers to create software applications and programs, and these tools have traditionally been targeted at a very technical audience. In most cases these tools require knowledge of one or more programming languages and can only be used by a technical person who has much more specialized software engineering skills. Products such as Microsoft Developer Studio™ and Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional™ are examples of such tools used to create software applications and programs that provide access to web services and similar data sources. Typically, the applications created using such tools are delivered as web sites, or applications that end users must download and install on their computers.
In spite of the ubiquity of the Web, and the concept of an installable computer application, a significant volume of information is disseminated and exchanged through electronic documents. Electronic documents are much more transportable than computer applications, and they also can be viewed without being connected to the internet, or logged into a corporate network. Because of this, it is advantageous to support electronic document creation, dissemination and viewing.
In spite of the advances in document creation tools, there still exists a gap between the content that can be created by software developer tools and the content that can be created by document creation tools. This is the case not only in terms of the level of interactivity and connectivity of the content, but also by the skill set required to create such interactivity and connectivity within the content.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide improved techniques for enabling a user without programming skills to create a document that combines interactive graphical components and connector components in an interactive control panel. Further, it would be advantageous to support exporting the interactive control panel that combines interactive graphical and connector components to a range of distributable digital document formats.